Perfect Timing for Writer-Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner on his DARK PLACES

When French director Gilles Paquet-Brenner decided to follow
his modest Holocaust drama Sarah’s Key with an adaptation of a nourish American
novel he liked, no one took much notice.

And then Gillian Flynn
followed Dark Places with
Gone Girl, which became a literary sensation and David Fincher’s next A-list
project, and suddenly Paquet-Brenner’s movie was a lot more visible.

“I actually optioned the book way before Gone Girl was even
written,” he explains over the phone from Paris. “It was just this little dark
thriller that nobody had any interest in, and then all of a sudden it became a
hot property.”

Dark Places stars Charlize Theron as Libby Day, a
troubled woman who’s spent decades failing to get over the trauma of surviving
her family’s murder. Drawn into a new investigation of the case, she learns
more than she ever wanted to about the night of the massacre – and doesn’t
handle it especially well.

“What’s interesting about Libby is that the audience for
most of the movie will have very conflicted feelings toward her,”
Paquet-Brenner says. “Some will hate her; some will understand where she’s
coming from. But I think in the end she grows on you, and that was the
idea.

“Charlize and I definitely made a choice not to beg for
likability, because we thought it would be really contrary to the essence of
the character. We gambled that people would like her at the end of the movie,
which is the only thing that matters. ”

Dark Places also has the advantage
of opening while people are still buzzing about Theron’s amazing turn as
Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. This is not lost on Paquet-Brenner.

“Charlize always has this real attraction to the
unsympathetic, difficult characters,” he says. “Maybe it has to do with how she
looks, maybe [once] it was because she needed to prove herself – though now she
doesn’t, she’s an Oscar-winning actress. But it’s interesting that those two
movies are [arriving] just a couple of months apart. It feels like she’s back
in that territory where people love her because she addresses these complex,
dark, twisted characters.

“I also know it’s a bit by chance, because when I met her
for the first time, she was just back from shooting Mad Max in Namibia, and now
it’s two years later and the two movies are out,” he laughs.